


The Shock of the Exit Leaves You Trembling

by StarkAstarte



Series: Stucky Stand-Alones [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-12
Updated: 2014-06-12
Packaged: 2018-01-24 02:46:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,310
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1588769
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StarkAstarte/pseuds/StarkAstarte
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He looks away first. The blue eyes burn him. He can feel them like scalpels, flaying layers of him away. Eventually they will cut deep enough to uncover the truth: that there is nothing underneath.<br/>________________________________</p><p>In the wake of pulling the man he swears he doesn't recognize out of the Potomac River and then being rescued in return, the Winter Soldier needs orders to follow. Captain Rogers is just the man to give them to him. </p><p>[A stand-alone fic to help me deal with some of my Post-Winter Soldier Angst :^]</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Shock of the Exit Leaves You Trembling

**Author's Note:**

  * For [OwnThyself](https://archiveofourown.org/users/OwnThyself/gifts).



“Tilt your head back, Buck.” Steve’s hands are warm on the curve of his neck. “If you aren’t planning on blinking, ever, I’m gonna have to intervene a little bit. Your eyes look like hell.”

He doesn’t relax, not even slightly, but he does what he’s told. “Don’t call me that,” he says. His voice sounds like gravel dumped down a long shoot into nothingness.

Steve lets go of him, the bottle of cool, medicated solution suspended in mid-air. A drop quivers from the applicator, falls, glittering, into the sunken place under his eye, the place where he still looks like he’s wearing war-paint, but isn’t. It feels like a tear, but it isn’t a real one. He doesn’t have any of his own. Steve takes a slow, patient breath. “What, don’t call you Bucky? It’s your name.”

He shakes his head violently. His hair falls over his face. He watches Steve through a gap in the tangled curtain. “No. It’s not.”

Steve sighs, sitting down beside him on the bed he gave him, the place where he doesn’t sleep. His weight shifts the mattress and they slide into each other. Neither of them acknowledges the press of their hips. Neither of them pull away. Their thighs meet in a kiss of dense muscle straining beneath fabric. “I’ve gotta call you something. Would James work better?”

He shakes his head again. “No.”

Steve looks at him. He looks at Steve. Counts the individual gleams of stubble sprouting along his jaw. His eyes are very blue. Troubled. The lashes are thick and curling, darker even than Steve’s eyebrows. He can’t count them. He wants to count them. He wants to know how many there are, how many of _everything_ there are that belong to Steve. If he knows, he might finally understand the expression on the other man’s face when their eyes meet. He looks away first. The blue eyes burn him. He can feel them like scalpels, flaying layers of him away. Eventually they will cut deep enough to uncover the truth: that there is nothing underneath.

Steve doesn’t say anything for a long time. Eventually he stands, towering over the man on the bed. He raises the bottle again. “Tilt your head back, Soldier.” His voice is stern. It licks a lightning bolt of an emotion through the empty cavern of himself that the prone man can’t decipher. He straightens his spine. He does as he’s told, his hair falling back. The cool un-tears wash his eyes clear. All he sees is Steve. The blue eyes cut deeper. He can’t look away.

 

 

“Rations, Soldier,” Steve says, plunking a battered metal plate down in front of him at the table. He tosses him a set of mess cutlery held together by a ring. The implements are dull and too small for his hands. He catches them, flipping them deftly until he’s gripping the fork. They feel right in his hand.

“Eat,” Steve tells him. He complies, stabbing a boiled potato and forking it into his mouth. It tastes like nothing. Just the way he likes it. Steve tried everything he could think of to coax him to eat something in the first week he was here, lox and cream cheese, biscotti dipped in hot cocoa, pizza dripping cheese and grease. Only boiled potatoes and spam have passed the test. He eats them for every meal he can’t get out of.

He cleans his plate in minutes and washes up after, leaving everything spotless. No trace of what has happened here.

 

 

“Soldier,” Steve says. “Hit the showers.”

He gets up and walks to the bathroom. He leaves the door open. He doesn’t like to be closed in. Every window in the apartment is open. He didn’t do it, but he likes it that way. The large window in the living-room is his favourite perch. He likes to dangle his feet over the pavement below. Knowing he could leap down if he wanted to. No one could stop him. He wonders if anyone would try.

Steve. Steve would. So he stays put.

He strips down, removing the borrowed sweatshirt that still smells like Steve, pulling the undershirt roughly over his head. It gets caught on his left arm, and he hears it tear like flesh. He makes a sound like a dumb animal caught in a barbed wire fence. His heart-rate spikes. He can feel the claw-hammer of his own pulse against his ribs.

Warm hands, larger than his own, grip him gently by his shoulders. He can only feel one of them, and it burns him. The other is nothing more than pressure.

“Stand down, Soldier.” Steve’s mouth is so close to his ear, he can feel the warmth of the taller man’s breath on his neck, smells its spearmint-and-cream scent, peculiar to Steve. Other people smell strange, smell _wrong_. He does as he’s told, inhaling through his nose as he relaxes his arms, his breath a ragged thing inside of him.

The hands slide along his bicep, disentangling shreds of cotton from segmented metal. “Third one this week,” he comments, a laugh barely buttoned up in his voice. “We’re gonna have to get you some clothes of your own, or we’ll both end up butt-naked.”

He clutches the waistband of his several-inches-too-long jogging pants possessively, digging his fingernails in to his own flesh. “No. I…like. These.”

“They don’t fit you, buddy. You can have some of the very same brand, same colour even, all your own.”

He jerks his head. “No.”

Steve rubs a small circle of warmth into the exposed small of his back. “Okay. Whatever you say, pal.”

“Don’t call me that.”

Steve straightens, moving away, taking his warmth with him. “I told you to strip. Soldier.” His voice is cool. Not so. Close. It washes over the half-nude man like something cleaner than he is. He jerks the waistband down, sloughing the pants off and balling them up tightly. His eyes dart around, looking for a good place to stash them.

Steve holds out his hand. “Here. They need washed.”

He clutches them to his chest, frowning. Steve’s eyes are sad. He knows what sad looks like. It’s one of the few emotions he can decipher for certain. “Don’t worry. I’m not gonna take them from you. Not for good. You can have them back when they’re clean. You’ve been wearing them for a week, B— _Soldier_. C’mon. Hand ’em over.”

He lets go quickly, turning away, his nakedness nothing more to him than is any other part of himself. He stares at the tub, the faucets gleaming, everything spit-spot the way soldiers sharing barracks tend to keep things, even during peace-time. Not that there has ever been such a thing. He himself had used the toothbrush Steve gave him on the grout, scrubbing it until it’d nearly dissolved. Steve took it away when he caught him, but he fished it back out of the garbage and stashed it under the sink. He likes to clean at night, when Steve is asleep. Steve gave him a new toothbrush. He’s already chewed it all to hell. He doesn’t brush his teeth so much as he tries to demolish them, layer by layer. His teeth always fight for their lives. He’s going to need a new toothbrush soon.

He leans over, turning the faucet with more force than is required. It’s how he does everything, lately. He’s broken so much. He can’t seem to get the hang of situational force. Everything goes to pieces in his hands. Everything he touches, Steve has to fix. The air in the apartment constantly stinks of superglue. He likes it. It smells like Steve making everything he does wrong right again.

The water thunders down, and he doesn’t like the sound of it. He presses his palms over his ears, watching the water swirl down the train. Steam rises and touches his naked skin like a hand he can’t shrug away.

“What’s the hold-up?” Steve asks, from where he’s standing, eyes averted. “Need me to leave?”

The soldier hesitates, standing on the mat. He feels naked in a different way, with Steve’s eyes on him. The water keeps gushing out, and he doesn’t want to step into it. He doesn’t want to be clean. If he’s clean, he will have to see himself as he is. He starts to shake. He feels the trembling like tremors of warning coursing through his limbs, disturbing the rigidity of his stance. He bows his head. His hair falls in front of his face, and he doesn’t have to see the water anymore.

“Don’t leave.”

“Okay.” Steve comes closer, slowly. “I won’t, I promise. But you gotta get yourself cleaned up. It’s time, Soldier. A little good old-fashioned Ivory’s gonna make you feel a whole lot better. Like a new man.”

The shaking doesn’t stop. His teeth chatter violently before he manages to snap them together. His jaw aches. He still doesn’t blink. His eyes are raw. His eyes are on fire.

He hears the rustle of Steve’s clothes before he sees them hitting the bathmat from the corner of his eye. The grey zip-up thing with the hood that Steve likes to wear with nothing on under it after running loops around the park every morning at dawn. The soft, loose dungarees. A pair of limp white socks, still clean.

The soldier’s eyes snap up in time to see Steve toying hesitantly with the waistband of his snug, pristinely white briefs. He has to swallow several times before his voice comes out. “What are you doing?” he whispers hoarsely.

Steve’s eyes are full of something he doesn’t understand. He thinks it might be called tenderness. “I’m coming in with you.”

The briefs slide down, and he can’t look away. The shaking is like an earthquake now. He crosses his arms over his chest to hold the tremors in. Steve stands naked before him, his eyes never faltering. The fine, dark hairs that grow in a thin pelt over his pectorals are numberless. His dog-tags jangle on their drain-chain as Steve crosses the tiny expanse of the bathmat to the tub. He draws the shower-curtain back, and the foggy mist extends its reach. Steve steps over the rim of the old-fashioned clawfoot and into the staccato-burst of spray. The soldier watches as he immerses himself, slicking his palms over his face and rolling his shoulders in the heat, finally running his fingers through the immaculately trimmed thatch of hair that, soaked with water, has darkened to something much browner than his usual dark gold.

He turns back around, and leans out of the shower, slowly extending his hand. Water streams down the muscular forearm, dribbling onto the floor. Steve’s eyes are bluer, somehow, when the rest of him is soaking wet. His hair stands to attention, as if every part of him is a soldier on parade. “You coming in, or what? You’re letting all the heat out, here.”

The soldier stares at the proffered hand for a minute that seems to go on forever. Then he takes it. Allows himself to be pulled by the wrist into the humid cubicle. Steve draws the curtain closed, encasing them within a world of steam and suffused light. It’s quieter in here. The rest of the world falls away. There is only breathing, quick and sharp. There is only Steve, glistening, leaning against the tiles, his head tilted back, his neck an unbroken column of sleek skin. The soldier stands, half in the spray and half out. Steve comes closer, slowly, deliberately taking him by the shoulder and pressing him into the cascade of hot water.

“This okay?” He knocks on the mechanical arm.

The soldier nods.

“Soap?”

He nods again, watching Steve retrieve the brand new bar of Ivory. He spirals it in his big hands, working it into a lather. “Turn around.” The soldier complies, standing ramrod straight as Steve massages the slippery emulsion into his neck and shoulders, smoothing it down his back and kneading into his hips. The soldier jolts when Steve’s thumbs gently graze his buttocks without lingering, but without hurrying, either. The large palms slide over the soldier’s abdomen and up to his pecs. He slips them into the crevices beneath the soldier's arms, scrubbing the tangled thatches of hair. “This hurt?” Steve asks, when his fingers explore the edge of the prosthesis, the gnarled no-man’s land of built-up scar-tissue slick beneath his fingers.

The soldier shakes his head. “No. I feel nothing.”

Steve rotates him gently around. He slides his fingers up the back of the soldier’s neck. He strokes the place alongside his heavily-stubbled jaw, just beneath his ear. “Nothing?”

The soldier says nothing. Steve’s brow furrows, his blue eyes sliding back and forth searchingly between the shadowed green ones. “Tip your head back,” he says, reaching behind himself for the shampoo. “I’m gonna wash your hair. Might have to use the whole damn bottle.” As if to prove his point, he digs around in the mass of chestnut tangles. He retrieves a large twig and a small, dry leaf. He quirks an eyebrow and grins. “What, were you sleeping in a tree before you let me find you?”

He shakes his head. “I wasn’t sleeping. And I didn’t let you.”

“Fine. You gonna let me wash this fur cap you call hair, or what?”

The soldier tilts his head back, neck stiff in Steve’s grip. Steve leans his face in closer. “Relax. I’m not gonna compromise you. You can still be Mr. Lone Soldier with clean hair.” Steve’s fingers, long and strong and not really very different from the boy’s whose face the soldier sometimes remembers in tattered flashes, massage the spicy-scented liquid into his scalp. He always had large hands. His features are the same, even if the rest of him needed help in catching up. The soldier doesn’t like to remember the frail boy. Doesn’t like to remember the fragility contained within the fabric of the man he tried and failed to destroy.

Steve’s fingernails scrape his scalp with the same firm gentleness he uses on him for everything else. Water pours across his vision. The shampoo stings. He can feel his eyes getting redder, angrier. “Close your eyes,” Steve murmurs. “It’ll be alright.”

The soldier’s eyes widen even more, and he tries to pull away. Steve clamps his hand down on his metallic shoulder, still holding the soldier by his nape. He squeezes it reassuringly. “It’s okay. I know, and it’s okay. It’s not gonna happen again, pal, not now, not ever. You just need to close your eyes for a minute so I can rinse you clean.”

The soldier glares. He puts a hand up and lays it against the broad chest, pushing experimentally. Not knowing for certain if he even wants to succeed. It’s the first time he has touched Steve Rogers voluntarily since pulling him from the jaws of the Potomac. Steve lets go of his shoulder and slides his hand along the soldier’s arm until his fingers are splayed over the mechanical ones trembling against his heart. “I’ve got you, Buck. You can close your eyes, because mine? Yeah, they’re open, pal. I’ll watch you. Make sure you’re A-okay.”

“Don’t call me any of that,” he mutters reflexively. But his eyes sink shut. He squeezes them closed like a heart trying to stop itself from going on beating. He grips Steve around the waist, can feel the surge of powerful musculature beneath the slick skin. Steve cradles him, dipping him back under the spray. It cascades over him, taking the soap and the grime with it. Steve rubs his back, and the skin squeaks like something both less and more human than he has ever been.

Steve runs his fingers through the tangle of hair until it, like the soldier, stops resisting. They both lay docile under Steve’s hands. The two men stand together under the spray for what feels like an eternity. The soldier doesn’t want it to stop, but he can’t wait for it to be over. He can’t go on like this, held up by the man he wanted dead not three weeks before. He must stand alone again, before he can’t.

With a snarl, he wrenches himself free of Steve’s grasp, leveraging himself out of the taller man’s grip, pushing him until the captain’s feet slip out from under him. The soldier topples out of the shower ass-over-teakettle onto the mat, bringing the shower curtain down with him, rod and all. Water sprays everywhere. It’s like a flood. It’s like drowning, the relief, the cool air gathering him up. He can breathe again.

Steve scrambles for purchase in the slippery tub, hauling himself to his knees and peering over the side to survey the new mess his old friend has made. “Bucky, seriously, what the _hell_ do you think you’re—”

The soldier springs to his feet, darting through the door and sliding across the polished floorboards of the hallway, a slick of water trailing in his wake. He’s naked, soaking wet, but he can’t feel it. The bedroom is the first door he sees. He flings himself through it. Leaps into the window casement. Clings to the slippery painted frame and leans out into the night. Leans out over Brooklyn.

“I’m not Bucky,” he says, when he perceives Steve’s step on the creaking floorboards. He doesn’t turn around. He tenses, his hamstrings poised for flight. Water pours over his shoulders and down his back. His hair is a stringy mass across his eyes. His pulse shrieks in his ears like an air-raid siren. A warm, soft weight drapes across his shoulders. A towel, still warm from the dryer, not even close to being the most miraculous machine of the age, but it’s as much as he can handle, most days.

“So you keep saying,” Steve says. “I’m never gonna believe that. I know that makes you mad, and that’s okay. You’re just gonna have to be mad for as long as it takes. Now, come outta that window, would ya? I’m freezing my butt off, here. You're not gonna let your CO freeze off his manly parts because you feel like throwing a tantrum, are you?”

Steve lays a hand on the soldier’s back. He can feel its heat, the slow circles of contact soothing his shaking to an intermittent, half-hearted shiver. Another towel drops down over his head, and Steve dries his hair, rubbing the sopping mass between his fingers until it stops dripping and begins to dry. The soldier likes the feel of the fabric across his face. Likes the sensation of the world falling away again, muffled to a near-silence he can better tolerate. He relaxes by increments, as much as he is able, until he’s sitting instead of hunkering, his arms at his sides, hands in his lap, one flesh, one gleaming metal. Steve leaves the towel where it is. It smells clean. It smells like Steve, and now, he does, too.

“I’m not Bucky,” he says.

Steve sighs. “You are to me.”

The soldier shakes his head, pulling the towel away and dropping it into the night. It flutters like a white flag into the nothingness of one AM. He turns slowly to look at Steve, sitting on the bed, towel draped around his hips, his elbows on his knees like a kid on the bleachers at a ballpark. His face as smooth and symmetrical as someone who’s never taken a punch in his life, rather than as many as he could get.

“I’m not Bucky,” the soldier repeats, his voice like a rusted chisel. Even in this light, Steve’s eyes are bluer than anything he’s ever seen. His mouth is as soft and warm as a rose. “But I want to be.”


End file.
